Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Tell me about your internship

Send me your the most irritating, painful or boring tasks you have at your internship.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

at my internship, i spent two months scanning the address and phone number database for the company, looking for duplicates. it was horrible.

same job, different day: very embarrassing phonecall to puerto rico. painful! nobody likes to be greeted over the phone by "ummm hello? do you speak english?" i don't blame them for hanging up on me.

you're doing a good job! hang in there!

Anonymous said...

i just spent 24 hours making 10 copies of 8 different books that people will probably throw away in 20 minutes.

Anonymous said...

Last summer, I had an internship that ended up basically as a job in a computer warehouse. To change things up a bit, on occasion we got to go out and install the equipment at schools and other customer locations. It mostly involved a huge amount of unpacking and repacking computer boxes.

Before one such excursion, an email was sent around by our boss detailing the people involved and their jobs. My good friend and fellow intern was listed as a... Box Specialist. Perhaps one day in the future, after more training, I can also pursue a lucrative career as a B.S.

Bobby said...

I was a communications/journalism major while in college and during the summer between sophomore and junior years, I interned in my college's News & Publications office and did boring press releases and other things. Probably the most irritating task they gave me was to organize thousands of slides that had collected in boxes over 40 years and put them in chronological order. They gave me that project during my first week and I worked on it every day and I finished it the week before the internship ended in the middle of August.
--Bobby
Austin, Texas

Ashram said...

I had to rearrange the backroom of the office. There's a huge poster of Michael Goldberg, half of a lifesized santa (head, arms, tummy), there were some of those clear masks with blue eye makeup, rosy cheeks, and lipstick, and then there was some underwear we gave away as a promotion. I used all these items (and other) to make a centerpiece for the room, right in the middle, on the ping pong table.

Laura J. Nelson said...

I'm a high school intern at a presidential library, and because much of the data that they use for research was entered in the '50s and '60s (before they had computers), I spend a lot of four-hour stretches typing lists into the computers. The documents are measured in feet, not pages (go figure) and one of the documents I transcribed was 106 feet long...

Anonymous said...

I spent 4 hours craning my neck and counting the number and types of lights we had throughout our plant. My neck hurt SO bad for the rest of the day, and I had to go back and do it again the next day because we couldn't find the first diagram I marked on!

Anonymous said...

I have been doing the layout for our department newsletter(I intern for two of my campus academic departments, one in the morning and one in the afternoon). I feel like it's one huge puzzle, only without the cute pieces. Otherwise, I like everything else I do, especially the occassional free food.

Anonymous said...

i do research 8 hours a day. the kind you would do for term papers and projects. o.o

Anonymous said...

For an internship at a magazine, I ended up assisting the editor-in-chief with personal tasks like getting his cell phone repaired and ordering flowers for his friend's birthday. I was never relegated to picking up coffee, though. That was the male intern's job.

Andrea said...

I once worked for an agency in NYC. The boss was a woman who liked to be careful with her money.

Therefore, all mail that came where the stamp wasn't stamped by the post office (hence a clean stamp), i would have to soak in water, and carefully peel off.

After that, I would have to dry all of said stamps. and then i had to be the stamp nazi, making all office employees use the ghetto stamps.

3 cheers for interns!

oh, and it wasn't even a paid internship!

Anonymous said...

I once worked as an intern to a CPA that forgot to enter the zip code on any of the tax returns (1040 sheets) he was "digitizing"....so I spent the entire day adding the zip code to over 1000 tax returns

Anonymous said...

I worked at a place where bands performed and after they left their dressing rooms, I had to clean up. I flushed the toilets for them and one band cut their hair on the bathroom floor. So I cleaned that up as well. Gross!!!

Anonymous said...

At my teaching internship, the door handle broke when a student closed the door. I got locked in my room with 15 students. The worst task ever was trying to keep them calm as I was locked in a windowless room with them. The custodian thought it was because I didn't know how to open the door. It took a while to get rescued because the custodian just kept saying "open the door".